Archive for February, 2015

We recently returned from the CP+ show in Yokohama, Japan. When we were there we sat down with executives from most of the major camera and lens manufacturers to get their insights and opinions on the challenges facing their companies and the market as a whole. One of them was Toshihisa Iida, Senior Manager Sales & Marketing at Fujifilm’s Optical Device & Electronic Imaging products division. Click through for the full interview

Reality is malleable and nothing is quite as it seems in the surreal world of photographer Erik Johansson, who takes hundreds of photos of a single subject, merges them together and digitally manipulates them to produce optical illusions and the strangest of scenes. Often, these subjects are creating the illusions themselves, changing their environment in unexpected ways.

A single woman spreads a snowy landscape by way of a giant white quilt, while a man climbs a ladder to erect pleasantly sunny surroundings like wallpaper to replace his dreary reality. Roads cut with giant scissors curl like fabric. Houses and streets are seen from multiple perspectives at once, M.C. Escher-style.

The Swedish-born, self-taught photographer starts with a sketch and begins the planning process, which can take months or even years for each shoot. “This is the most important step as it defines the look and feel of the photo, it’s my raw material,” says Johansson. “This step also includes problem solving, how to make the reflections, materials etc. realistic.”

Curious about the whole process? Johansson offers a layer-by-layer breakdown of his image “Let’s Leave” in the video above. Check out some of the artist’s earlier work, too.

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Mind-Bending Digital Photo Manipulation by Erik Johansson

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Time to try out your aperture range. Last week you were encouraged to shoot wide opened using a large aperture.

Now you need to crank it the opposite direction and get some maximum depth of field in this weekly photography challenge of using a small aperture.

By Michael Chen

Weekly photography challenge

First let’s define small aperture. Usually when photographers talk about a large aperture it’s in the f/1.8 to f/4 range. Small apertures would include f/11 and smaller (f/16-f/32). What that means is the lens is letting in less light due to the smaller opening – and it also means more of the scene is in sharp focus, or deep depth of field.

You may need to use a tripod for this one as the small aperture consequently also means you’ll need to use a longer shutter speed. Keeping the ISO low will help you avoid noise as well and keep sharpness to the maximum.

Here are a few more examples:

By zman z28

By Michael Bohlander

By Vasile Hurghis

Lavender perspective by Peter Zelei on 500px

Share your small aperture images here:

Simply upload your shot into the comment field (look for the little camera icon in the Disqus comments section) and they’ll get embedded for us all to see or if you’d prefer upload them to your favourite photo sharing site and leave the link to them. Show me your best images in this week’s challenge. Sometimes it takes a while for an image to appear so be patient and try not to post the same image twice.

I remember my first time in a Real Professional Camera Store, Samy’s Camera, in Los Angeles. I had money to burn in my pocket so that I could buy the right equipment to be a Professional Photographer, but instead of being a kid in a candy store, I was a vegetarian in a hunting store. Nothing looked familiar. There were Continue Reading

The post Gear Guide: The Ultimate Authority on What to Put in Camera Bag appeared first on Photodoto.

Over the last few weeks on dPS we’ve had some collections of images that demonstrate some of the basic photography principals. Last week it was using a large aperture for shallow depth of field. This time we’re going the other way and looking for images with a lot of depth of field, ones that utilize small apertures like f/16 or even smaller.

These are usually images with a lot of depth and focus from near to far. Landscape photographers use this technique often as do, surprisingly, macro shooters. When you get up close the depth of field is really slim so you need that added focus from the smaller apertures (if not using focus stacking techniques).

As a neat side effect if you include a light source like direct sunlight – smaller apertures will turn those into starbursts – a telltale sign you know a small aperture was used.

So here are some images that exemplify maximum sharpness and large depth of field:

No monitor in the world can fully do justice to the amazing level of detail in this sequence, but be sure to go full screen when watching in this video, regardless, to get a taste of the possibilities. Aside from other urban subjects, the selection of a favela for one of these shots gave the photographer an opportunity to show off how a place so rich in variegated colors and textures could be displayed at various scales.

Each 80-megapixel image (frames at 10328×7760 pixels) was shot by John Capra to illustrate the capabilities of the PhaseOne IQ180 camera. These series were shot while on an assignment in Brazil to do a series of 4K and 8K timelapses, but blow even those out of the water. In the video, Capra keeps zooming in to highlight just how much one can capture and see.

“I wanted to show a couple things with this demo video,” says Capra.“First, the extreme resolution of this camera (and medium format in general). Second, the amazing amount of flexibility this resolution allows for in post production. You can literally get about 8-10 solid 1920×1080 shots out of a single shot. You can also get about 5-6 solid 4K shots out of a single shot.”

“Each shot was very minimally processed and included curves, input sharpening, saturation adjustments. The h264 compression really kills alot of the fine detail. No noise reduction was done on any of the shots. I tried to keep the shots as close to raw as possible so you may see some dust spots, noise, and manual exposure changes I made while shooting. For a final video edit these adjustments would be smoothed out and fixed. Normally I run shots where I manually change exposure during the shot through LRTimelapse, but unfortunately the program can’t seem to handle such huge raw files. I also had to loop some shots in order to have enough runtime to do some zooms, so you may see a jump in the footage here and there.”

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The United Kingdom is hoping to retain an album containing photographs by Oscar Rejlander, and as such it has instituted a temporary export ban on the relic. The ban will prevent the album from being sold to a foreigner and leaving the country (for now), and will possibly provide enough time to study the collection and its origins. Read more